Book review: 'Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe'

“Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe” (Greystone, paper, $16.95) by Charlotte Gill gets my enthusiastic vote as the best nonfiction book of 2012. In some 240 pages of highly readable prose, Gill takes us into the little-known world of Canadian tree planters, a loose “tribe” of young, incredibly fit people, often students working for the summer, who boat, helicopter and truck into remote forest cut blocks to spend exhausting hours spading small seedlings back into the ravaged earth. Gill’s narrative is by turns gripping, funny, informative but always tactile. After an hour or so immersed in her pages, the reader may find himself a little stiff in the joints and sore in the back.

Gill spent 20 years making a living at her trade — she planted a million or so trees over that time, hundreds on a typical day, earning pennies to a dollar a seedling — and her voice resonates with deep experience. She will be the first to admit that tree planting isn’t rocket science. After being ferried to their work sites, the teams sallied forth, their hip-hugging sacks loaded with small seedlings in cardboard cups. Armed with narrow spades, they bent, thrust, planted and pushed with their boots again and again. If they were lucky, the cut blocks were “creamy,” that is, unobstructed and nicely churned. More typically, they were strewn with stumps and logs and shredded underbrush, looking more like tornado-scarred landscapes than clear cuts.

Given the remote locations of these sites, Gill and her comrades became stoically self-reliant and had to be prepared for any number of hazards, from wasp stings to sharp stakes to grizzly bears and cougars. Mostly, however, their work was mind-numbingly routine and endless. Yet there were significant rewards for her. “There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field that it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers. It has a way of filling up a life with verbs that push into one another, with no idle space in between. So that you just can’t believe all the things you saw or all the living beings that brushed your skin.”

Weather is a major factor in this kind of work, and Gill writes beautifully of northwestern Canada’s clammy, mist-shrouded forests. But foggy conditions mean everything is wet and gritty and grubby and messy. “In the forests there is nowhere to look without a plant in the way,” she writes, “without ferns and moss and branchy lattices. Chlorophyll proliferates with a patient aggression. The canopy blots out the sky. Sometimes the only sound, besides the dripping, is the silent roar of matter breaking down and melting back into the soil. Amid the huge trunks and sunless rot, one can easily believe that the forests are winning.”

This is before the logging companies get there, of course. Do not read “Eating Dirt” expecting an anti-logging diatribe, however. Gill is cleareyed about the business, and she made her living in a little-known corner of it. The logging companies are allowed to increase the number of trees they can cut each year — known as the Annual Allowable Cut — if they pay to plant more trees “as a promissory note to the woods.” “Because we plant trees,” Gill explains, “logging companies can cut more today. And that is the irony of us.”

When not laboring in the cut blocks, Gill and her comrades were lodged in small motels or the loggers’ abandoned bunk houses. They gulped down 5,000 calories a day to fuel their work and collapsed into unmade beds. “In just a few short weeks, we shrink down and harden,” she writes, “like boot leather dried too fast. We have calluses on top of calluses, piled up on our arms and soles. We have washboard backs as well as stomachs. Arms ropy, muscled and veined.”

As hard as her days were, Gill became addicted to the endeavor, and her account is nothing less than an elegiac hymn to the tree planter’s life. No matter how backbreaking or endless the routine, she had faith that each small act with her spade would one day, far beyond her death, yield a towering and glorious new tree. Noble work, indeed.

John Sledge edits the Press-Register’s Books page. He may be reached at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.